Six Behind the Scenes Photos and Videos at eLearning Brothers

We had a blast producing our video, We Are eLearning Brothers. The principles that we followed in producing the video made it something of a breeze. We hope you’ll take the time to read through our Producing an eLearning Video blog series, and see exactly how it was done.

Once any project of a fairly large magnitude is completed, it’s fun to look back and review what was accomplished. Below you’ll find some “behind the scenes” photos and videos with a description of what is being done. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did.

In this image you can see that our boom mic (a Zoom H1 Handy Recorder) has it’s line out cabled around and down the boom pole, and then directly into the camera. This makes it so we didn’t have to sync any audio with our video. Also, our sound guy’s headphones are tied directly into the camera so that he is hearing exactly what is being recorded. Shoutout to our foosball players who were truly acting (we didn’t let them play with an actual ball).

No I didn’t wear that ridiculous hat for longer than one minute. The lighting setup we used for our primary landing area can be see in this photo. The camera can be seen mounted on a tripod on the left side, though when we were shooting I kept it shoulder mounted for 90% of the time. Using at least two lights to light your subject is a must if you want to look well produced. Three lights is generally expected, and many times I had a third light coming in from the actress’s left. Also, be sure that your camera doesn’t block the light from hitting your subject.

Most videos require actors to not only memorize lines, but to also memorize movements, actions, and other nuances. What we don’t think about is that this also means that the camera operator must be prepared to make whatever adjustments or changes are required to stay caught up. In this video you can see me following our actress around without a camera, and looking for obstacles that we’ll need to be aware of. Blocking and thorough planning will help with this.

The camera we shot on was the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera. It gives a lot more control than most DSLR’s and also required a little more work to make it great. For smoother motion, we attached it to a Neewer shoulder rig and attached a follow focus to the lens to make things a little easier for me as an operator. This camera shoots in Apple ProRes which has a compressed color profile. Some people like the ProRes look and don’t make any adjustments in edit, but we were looking for a more clean and vibrant look, so I used Blackmagic’s color correcting software (Davinci Resolve) to bring the color levels out of compression.

People love the movies, and therefore love helping make them. We tried to include everyone who wanted to participate in at least one scene of our production. Almost all of them were going to actually be on camera so we had to have several rehearsals before shooting the scene. As you can see, everyone was having a pretty fun time. Another thing to notice is that we did not have a dolly for this last shot, and so I sat in a wheelchair and maneuvered myself backwards as the stage was revealed.